Prologue

      Two minutes it says to wait, two minutes and bam! Your life changed forever. Imagine that. No God, on second thoughts, let’s not. Let’s just calm down, breathe deeply and concentrate. I take off my watch. It’s one of those underwater sports ones. Great for boiling eggs and ideal for timing how long my mother can monologue on the phone whilst I am doing something else.

      I never dreamt I’d be using it for this.

      I set it: 2.00. The numbers glow neon in the darkness, a countdown to my fate. Could I be? If I really thought I was, surely I’d have chosen somewhere better than a self-cleaning toilet in the middle of SE1 to have such a life-changing experience.

      1.45

      It was only once. Once! Out of only a handful of times that we’d even bloody done it in the first place – that we thought we’d…how can I put this…leave it to Jim’s impeccable timing and wing it.

      1.40

      But there’s winging it and winging it, isn’t there? And the more images of that night come at me like film stills on double speed replay, the more I’m thinking the odds are stacked against us.

      1.35

      There’s the position for a start. Oh Shit. Me on my back, legs wrapped around his neck in possibly the most sperm receptive position of all time, on day 16 ( I know, I’ve counted, about a million times) of my cycle.

      1.00

      And then there were the knickers: black satin tie-at-the-side jobs, and on a school night. I mean, what kind of whore am I? And the fact I can’t drive. If only I could drive, this could all have been avoided. If my mother had just bought me driving lessons at seventeen like every other reasonable mother in the whole world, if she had just trusted me, not assumed I was an accident waiting to happen (quite literally), I would have driven home, safely home, very probably in a thoroughly un-alluring pair of Bhs briefs, and been tucked up in bed by 11 p.m. instead of flat on my back with my legs around Jim Ashcroft’s neck.

      0.40

      Please God, I’m begging you. I cannot be pregnant. I don’t even have a boyfriend. Jim and I are just good friends. So good, admittedly, we tend to fall into each other’s beds after one too many on a Friday night when the proposition of a cuddle seems like a good idea, but still, we are ‘just good friends’.

      0.27